CBS probe must look at standards

Commentary: Accountability, methods at issue in fiasco

By

MarshallLoeb

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- One of the big questions swirling around the CBS fiasco over its coverage of George W. Bush's Vietnam War-era duty in the National Guard three decades ago is whether its reporting stemmed from a shadowy, liberal plot to "get" the Republican president.

But the supreme irony of such an ugly scenario is that it stands to severely hurt the candidacy not of the incumbent but of his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry.

That's because there are only 41 days til Election Day on Nov. 2, and Kerry, far behind in most polls, needs every one of those days to establish the traction that so far has eluded his campaign. But now the media will be dominated and distracted not by Kerry's policy punch and counter-punch but by the National Guard memos scandal, its provenance and political fallout, how it will affect CBS, how the network will respond to it and struggle to regain its old luster.

Fortunately, there was one bracing sign: The two elder statesmen chosen by CBS to conduct a forensic analysis of the episode are sound, reassuring choices. Between them, they have excellent knowledge of the media, the law and politics.

Dick Thornburgh not only was the moderate Republican governor of Pennsylvania from 1978 through 1986 but also was attorney general from 1988 to 1991 under presidents Reagan and Bush the elder. Besides bringing a professional politician's knowledge to the assignment, he's also an expert prosecutor.

Louis Boccardi is the quintessential journalist. He was president from 1985 to 2003 of The Associated Press, which serves more than 16,000 media outlets internationally (including CBS and all its major competitors) and provides a thorough daily report. As a longtime leader in the wire-service business, Boccardi knows the importance of objectivity in the media, but he's also keenly aware of the pressures to get an urgent story into print. Having supervised and vetted thousands of sensitive stories, he knows that there's nothing to be gained by getting something first it you're getting it wrong.

One hopes that these wise old pros will remind us of the verities of Journalism 101 but will also bring forward some new lessons that all in the media can learn from. CBS is a unit of Viacom
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a significant investor in MarketWatch Inc., the publisher of this report.

Other questions are also pressing for Thornburgh and Boccardi, starting with these:

Why was CBS so quick to run its flawed story, and so slow to run a retraction -- two weeks after it first broke the story? Has the rise of cable news networks, notably Fox, which won bigger audiences than the Big 3 broadcast networks in covering the Republican National Convention in New York, led to a loosening of standards of accuracy on the part of the traditional news networks?

Why did the network base its case so heavily on one source, former Texas Air National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who lied about the source of the disputed documents on Bush's service? What ever happened to the old journalistic rule that you had to have two named sources for everything reported in a story?

What standard does CBS use for verifying stories, or does it use different standards depending on the programs on the network? Morley Safer, the veteran correspondent, told The New York Times that the story, which ran on a Wednesday spin-off edition of "60 Minutes," never would have passed muster with the fact-checking procedures of the original Sunday edition of "60 Minutes."

Should CBS have an ombudsman, and independent voice to examine its coverage and criticize it after the fact? Irwin Gratz, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, said, "If CBS News felt they had enough layers of review in place, and if those procedures were followed, they obviously need to rethink those procedures."

Does anyone have to take the rap for CBS's failure? Answer: probably. Television has a long history of firing at least one big boss after any significant scandal. But it's usually a network president or a producer, not the anchor person.

Many observers are keenly asking whether anchorman Dan Rather, age 72, who was the reporter on the story, must go. Probably not, though his long-speculated retirement timeline may be accelerated.

Says Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, "The right loves to beat up on Dan Rather so much that they don't want him to go." And, adds Jane Kirtley, professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, "Throwing meat to the barking dogs is not a solution."

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